Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

Later he'd mentioned to Lydia how astonished he'd been that she hadn't married such a dazzling suitor. She'd been deeply insulted and demanded indignantly why he thought she'd have been taken in by a strutting oaf in a Life Guards uniform.

He grinned to himself and pushed the memories away. However it had transpired, Dennis and his other friends-Frank Ellis, the mourn-ful Nigel Taverstock, the Honorable Bertie's Equally Honorable brother Evelyn-had had a close escape. Lotta had known them all. They were all the type of young men she

liked- rich, good-looking, and susceptible. How long would it have been before she had chosen an-other of them as her next victim, when enough years had passed for them to forget poor Bertie's death?

What old score was Lotta paying off, he wondered, folding up his jotted lists, in the persons of those wealthy young men? He donned his scarf and bowler and slowly descended the narrow stairway past the purposeful riot of the day rooms, stopping briefly to thank his reporter friend with a discreet reference to "King and Country."

Had it been some ancient rape or heartbreak, he wondered as he descended the long hill of Fleet Street, its crush of cabs and trams and horse-drawn buses dwarfed by the looming shadow of St. Paul 's dome against the chilly sky. Or merely the furious resentment of a cocky and strong-willed girl who hated the poverty in which she had grown up and hated still more the satin-coated young men whose servants had pushed her from the flagways and whose carriage wheels had thrown mud on her as they passed?

Judging by Mile. La Tour's books, Celestine-or Chloe-seemed to be far more apt to pay for her own dresses than Lotta was, and the men who did buy her things were not the men of Lotta's circle. Their names were always different; evidently few men lived long enough to supply her with two hats. She was either more businesslike about her kills than Lotta, or simply less patient,

Was she, he wondered, also a "good vampire"? Like Lotta, did she savor those kisses flavored with blood and innocence? Did she make love to her victims?

Were vampires capable of the physical act of love?

The women would be, of course, he guessed-capable of faking it, anyway. As he descended to the Underground at the Temple a woman spoke to him in the shadows where the stair gave onto the platform, her red dress like dry blood in the gloom and her glottal vowels scrawling Whitechapel almost visibly across her painted mouth. Asher tipped his hat, shook his head politely, and continued down the steps, thinking: They would have to feed somewhere else before undressing, to warm the death-chill from their flesh.

Back at Prince of Wales Colonnade he returned to the now-neat cata-logue of Lotta's finances. Seated tailor-fashion on the bed in his shirt sleeves, he sorted through the bills, letters, and cards, arranged by prob-able date. Mile. La Tour had only served her vampire clientele for a few years, of course-the earliest entry for Mrs. Anthea Wren was in 1899. Lotta's pile of yellowing bills dated back through the nineteenth cen-tury and into the eighteenth, paid by men long dead to modistes whose shops were closed, sold, or incorporated with others'-a woman cannot keep the same dressmaker for seventy-five years if she herself doesn't age.

There were only four names on the recent invitations not accounted for either in the obituaries or last week's Society pages.

There was a Ludwig von Essel who had bought Lotta things between April and December of 1905 and was then heard of no more. There was Valentin Calvaire, who had first bought Lotta a yoked waist ofpeau de soie, embroidered and finished with silk nailheads, whatever those were, in March of this year; and a Chretien Sanglot, who had sent her a card of invitation to meet him at the ballet and who not only picked up his mail at the same pub as Calvaire did but, to Asher's semitrained eye, at least, wrote in the same execrable French hand. And lastly, there was someone whose name appeared on bills dating from the Napoleonic Wars and on notes of Baton's finest creamy pressed paper, less than two years old: someone who signed himself Grippen in black, jagged writing of a style not seen since the reign of James

I.

He made an abstracted supper of bread and cold tongue while writing up a precis of his findings, lighting the gas somewhere in the midst of his work without really being aware of it. He doubted that the families of any of Lotta's victims were responsible for the killings, but if Lotta and Calvaire had hunted together, her victims' friends might be able to offer leads. Lydia would undoubtedly know where he could reach the Honorable Evelyn and Westmoreland's fiancee, whatever her name was, but again, he'd have to be careful-careful of the vampires, who must, he knew, be suspecting his every move, careful, too, of the killer, and careful of whatever it was that Ysidro wasn't telling him,

His Foreign Office habits prompted him to add a shorter list, just for the sake of off-chances: Anthea Wren; Chloe/Celestine Watermeade/ Winterdon/du Bois; Valentin Calvaire/Chretien Sanglot; Grippen. And looking up, he discovered to his utter surprise that it was quite dark outside,

He hadn't strolled for very long along the crowded flagways of Gower Street when he was suddenly aware of Ysidro beside him. The vampire's arrival was not sudden-indeed, once Asher glanced to his left and saw the slender form in its black opera cape at his elbow, he knew he had been there for some time. He had concentrated on watching for his appearance, but it seemed to him that something had distracted him- he could no longer remember what.

Annoyed, he snapped, "Would you stop doing that and just come up to me like a human being?"

Ysidro thought about it for a moment, then countered quietly, "Would you stop identifying all the exits from a house before you go into it? I have a cab waiting."

The houses in Half Moon Street were Georgian, red brick mellowed by time and somewhat blackened by the veiling soot of the city's atmo-sphere, but retaining the graciousness of moderate wealth. Most of them showed lights in their windows; in the gaslight, Asher could make out the minuscule front gardens-little more than a few shrubs clus-tered around the high porches-groomed like carriage horses. An inde-finable air of neglect clung to Number Ten, three-quarters of the way down the pavement. Asher identified it as the result of a jobbing gar-dener who had not been kept up to his work, and front steps that went weeks or months without being scrubbed-fatal, in London.

"Housekeeping presents its own problems for the Undead, doesn't it?" he remarked quietly as they ascended the tall steps to the front door. "Either you keep servants or scrub your doorstep yourself-the windows here haven't been washed, either. Every doorstep on the street is brickbatted daily but this one."

"There are ways of getting around that." Ysidro's face, in profile against the reflection of the street lamps as he turned the key, retained its calmly neutral expression.

"I'm sure there are. But even the stupidest servant is going to notice something amiss when nobody orders any food or uses the chamber pots."

The vampire paused, the tarnished brass door handle in his gloved hand. He regarded Asher enigmatically, but in the back of his brim-stone-colored eyes, for an instant, Asher half thought he glimpsed the flicker of amused appreciation. Then the black cloak whispered against the doorframe, and Ysidro led the way into the house.

"Edward Hammersmith was the youngest son of a nabob of the India trade, almost exactly one hundred years ago," he said, his light, uninflected voice echoing softly in the darkness. "The house was one of

three owned by the family; Hammersmith asked for and got it from his father after he became vampire, thereafter gaining a reputation as the family's reclusive eccentric. He was in his way a reclusive eccentric even as a vampire-he seldom went out, save to hunt."